


February, 1996

by alesuund



Series: everyone's got stuff, really. [1]
Category: My Mad Fat Diary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-21
Updated: 2014-05-21
Packaged: 2018-01-26 01:08:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1669136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alesuund/pseuds/alesuund
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>reading in between the lines of pre-canon finn nelson. part of a series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	February, 1996

By the time he was seventeen, Finn Nelson’s sexual reputation was somewhat considerable, whispered about in hushed tones in ladies’ toilets between classes at Stamford City College. At thirteen he’d discovered that girls liked his face and he liked their curves—sex naturally followed. He was a fast learner, could coax filthy sounds out of them with his fingers and his lips in borrowed backseats and pub bathrooms. Though he was kind and considerate with his lovers he was not particularly sentimental. He’d had girlfriends (5) and he’d had one-offs (many more than 5) and he valued the time he’d spent with all of them, but he had never been in love, not even the kind of innocent teenage puppy love his nan’s favorite musicians used to sing about. He just needed to pass idle, adolescent time, fucking away the minutes, warm and safe and inside. When all was said and done he could leave, and some small part of him felt liberated. It was he who got to leave, with a kiss and a promise, and finally not be the one who was left.

At sixteen he’d had a change of heart, an arcane vision of clarity that surged through him in the middle of the night. He’d woken up in Stacey Stringfellow’s bed feeling empty and frantic and when he’d locked eyes with her in the dark and her lips had curled up with smug contentedness and expectation he realized there was nothing about Stacey that he liked. Like all the rest, she liked him because he was “the fittest lad at college” and she wore him on her arm like a trophy of her great social success. She was insincere, disingenuous, and conniving, the kind of person who cared less about the things you had to say and the feelings you had in your heart and more about when it was her turn to speak and to impose her own will. She listened to crap FM, loved the Backstreet Boys and once spent an entire car ride home from college taking the piss out of Thom Yorke’s bad eye when Creep came on the radio. She didn’t get Finn. She never would.

So he left her.

He shrugged her off and crept out of her room that night barefoot into the snow with hardly a word, pulled on his boots at the door and walked home. Halfway through his third cigarette he realized that he hated this part of himself, that lonely, broken part of himself that filled time and need by burying himself in girls he could never love. His father hadn’t raised him to grow into that kind of man and he couldn’t allow himself to carry on that way anymore. Lying back in his own bed, looking up at the stars through his skylight he thought that maybe the solution to his misery lay not in the wasting of kisses and time and tangled limbs but in love and acceptance and music. Maybe it started with strong platonic connections, and Finn wasn’t lacking good, loyal mates, but what he really wanted—needed—was a person so tuned to his own frequency that he could strip off leather and flannel and they would see not lean muscle or the cut of his jaw but see, truly see, all the things that he kept hidden and protected deep within the chambers of his heart. And that, Finn thought, was fucking terrifying.

He had stuff nobody knew about. Everyone had stuff, didn’t they?

**Author's Note:**

> i have very serious finn nelson feelings almost all the time because there are a hundred little character hints in the show that are never touched upon at all and i had to write about my headcanons. this is part of a longer series of in between moments that are hidden in the subtext but never really explored in the canon or on screen.


End file.
